In this article, Michael Doyle argues that multipolarity is reflecting back into UK society as a result of Uneven and Combined Development, with consequences for the future of politics, the working class, and social cohesion.
As 2026 begins, political instability remains pervasive, the economy is growing at a slow pace, and there is a continuing decline in living standards. Once again, the late summer months of 2025 in the UK were incredibly tense due to far-right organisations, with the dutiful participation of former Tory ministers, demonstrating outside hotels housing unprocessed asylum seekers. Much of the analysis around this has been confined to domestic political factors, including the Home Office, the rise of Reform UK, and successive governments’ promises to reduce the number of immigrants entering the country, which have incited anger among voters. However, the international dimension is just as important and not only broadens the analytical range, but provides a far more substantial explanation for the rise of the far-right and the rickety state of social cohesion. The international is not just something ‘out there’ beyond the borders of a state. It is part of a population’s domestic public consciousness of itself as a national society.
To assess how the emerging multipolar international system is reshaping UK politics and the working class, we need a Marxist theory of International Relations that does not treat the domestic and international systems as discrete units. Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) is the best theoretical approach. It makes three interrelated claims about social reality. The world is uneven, containing many societies at different stages of development. These societies are combined because they interact with each other. This interaction is the key driver of development and change. To understand how multipolarity reflects back into UK society, we need to historicise the uneven and combined interaction between China’s state capitalism and advanced Western neoliberalism. Whilst this interaction may seem to be irrelevant to the intercommunal strife of the past several years, the economic dislocation caused by China’s substantial impact on the UK economy has accelerated deindustrialisation and the attendant decline in class consciousness.
At the beginning of the 1990s, intersecting with the complacent Western declaration that ‘History had ended’, the rapid deindustrialisation that had taken off during the previous decade gave rise to China as an economic powerhouse. Exploiting the ‘privilege of historical backwardness’, that is, contemporaneity with Western economies already advanced further down the path of industrialisation, meant that late developers need not retrace the same steps of economic development. Rather, they can import the technologies, the knowledge and process of industrialisation from abroad. Hence, China was able to reach the same level of economic development (per capita GDP) in just under twenty years as Britain did over 160 years. Furthermore, the Communist government of China embarking on such a program of rapid capitalist industrialisation vividly illustrates how relevant UCD is in the 21st century.
The International
Consider the relationship between the rise of Chinese manufacturing power and the deindustrialisation of provincial England. This may at first glance appear disconnected from the issue of immigration, yet the anxiety felt about immigration is linked to material uncertainty. Industry in the UK faced both government neglect and competition from China and India. Chinese accumulation has had a profound impact on the world economy since the 1978 Deng Reforms, which liberalised the Chinese economy and was more able to seamlessly combine with the international economic system and its ongoing neoliberalisation.
Between 2000 and 2007, the number of manufacturing jobs in Britain fell by over one-quarter, with a loss of almost a million jobs. Analysis suggested that China’s export surge was responsible for one-fifth to one-third of the decline in Britain between 2000 and 2015. By contrast, London has benefited from China’s development trajectory. It has become the leading Western financial centre for Chinese currency markets. This is partly a consequence of the UK government adopting a looser form of regulation. Furthermore, London is the largest offshore hub for handling renminbi payments, and this has a dual effect amplified by the uneven and combined nature of the international system. London’s status as the global finance centre is reinforced, thus deepening the socioeconomic unevenness within the UK, whilst strengthening China’s geoeconomic position without attendant political liberalisation domestically.
Domestic Politics and Class
Although it has become a cliché amongst the Westminster chattering classes, there is a genuine phenomenon of ‘left behind communities’ across post-industrial England, Wales and Scotland. The material deprivation is acknowledged with promises of ‘levelling up’, yet this does not amount to any meaningful practical action. The hollowing out of the labour movement and its institutions has been concomitant with a decline in class consciousness that readily identifies the source of that material deprivation with the vicissitudes of capitalism. Despite the brief upsurge of strike action in 2022, working-class militancy remains at desperately low levels.
Recent efforts to form a new left party have been mired by the usual narrow sectarianism and bureaucratic wrangling. No analysis of the class dynamics of UK society has been forthcoming, leaving the socialist left in limbo. The Greens under Zack Polanski have stepped into the breach with endless repetition about how a wealth tax will make the UK a ‘fairer society’. None of this is satisfactory, to say the least. Yet if there is one upside to this current state, then it must be that next year will see a renewed effort to revitalise class politics.
The sentiment that has grown in provincial England in reaction to economic dislocation is nationalism. Yet it has not taken the form of an anti-Chinese nationalism, but rather a populist nationalism that, rather than focus on the forces of global capitalism, displaces this antagonism onto immigrants and asylum seekers. The uneven and combined development of global capitalism has displaced or reconfigured political antagonisms to the left’s disadvantage.
Conclusion
The great Marxist theorist Tom Nairn wrote in his seminal The Break-up of Britain that nationalism is the ‘mobilisation against the unpalatable truth of grossly uneven development’. For Nairn, class politics is submerged under nationalism. These words are as true in 2025 as they were in 1977. What has reemerged in England over the past 20 years is a nationalism that is a reaction against the offshoring of industry (perhaps an unconscious angst at the loss of the empire), albeit displaced.
The unipolar moment, as it was christened in 1991 after the dissolution of the USSR, is giving way to a new multipolarity that, far from being confined to the international dimension, is having reverberations in the domestic realm. For the first time since the advent of the duopolistic Westminster party system, there is European-style, multiparty political competition, which has the potential to destabilise the British state with the election of a populist, hard-right nationalist party. To combat this, the left needs organisation which properly aligns with the changing world order and its consequences in the national sphere.
